


De Bono Coniugali

by ineptshieldmaid



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Other, canon law, guilt and sin, marriage law, sacramental theology, things which are only funny to medievalists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 19:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20051143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineptshieldmaid/pseuds/ineptshieldmaid
Summary: Aziraphale considers him for a second. ‘My dear, I’d have thought you’d have positively relished the idea of a sacrament, if only to defile it.’‘Not this one,’ Crowley says, leaden. ‘Ihaven’t. Not in all… It’s always been you.’‘Nonsense,’ Aziraphale says, briskly, ‘Monogamy has nothing to do with it. We committed sodomytwicelast Sunday.’ Crowley goes to speak, but Aziraphale is nothing if not skilled in rhetoric, and he holds up a hand, ‘which, of course, does notinvalidatethe sacrament; it’s rather like baptism, it can’t be reversed, but itcanbe defiled, and I think all authorities would agree that vigorous sodomy on Sundays defiles the sacrament of marriage.’---Or, your author has too many degrees, and isn't a fan of sappy marriage fic.





	De Bono Coniugali

**Author's Note:**

> Anchored to the book for chronology, but if you loathe the TV show, well, I found its characterisation to be both nice and accurate, so this might not be your cup of tea.
> 
> Content: no archive warnings in fact apply here. However, I am not a wizard nor a mind-reader: **I cannot predict your personal triggers, and I take no responsibility to do so**. The tags above are descriptive, not exhaustive.

It’s an oppressively hot day in the 21st century. Aziraphale is contemplating the fact that Adam Young saw fit to restore both bookshelf and Bentley, but not the tundra that is now so swiftly thawing. Perhaps he hadn’t the power. Perhaps he had, but hadn’t the scope of mind: after all, though the scale of the catastrophe is a matter of the present, so much of the damage was done before Adam was even born. He put everything back to normal, and decades later this is normal and humanity will just have to live with it.

The shop bell clangs, and Aziraphale prepares to studiously ignore the customer, but it’s just Crowley.

‘You’re early, my dear boy,’ Aziraphale says, raising an eyebrow. Crowley often is early these days. Aziraphale supposes there’s no reason not to be: heaven and hell have left them alone for so long. They abandoned the pretext of surprise meetings after the Apocalypse. No one seemed to care. And so Crowley began collecting Aziraphale in the Bentley, and Aziraphale consented to take his life - or his corporeal future- in his hands every Saturday on the way to lunch. And now Crowley is early.

‘Angel.’ Crowley looks around, furtive, like he honestly expects customers in here. Aziraphale would be offended, but he’s deduced that paranoia is a necessary career trait in Hell. ‘We need to talk.’

‘Of course,’ Aziraphale says, ushering him into the back room. ‘Any time.’

‘Has it occurred to you,’ Crowley says, waving one arm wildly, ‘that we’re married?’

Aziraphale blinks at him for a second, and then resumes his trajectory toward his favourite chair. ‘Well, Mrs Kowalski did ask me the other day where my husband was, because she hadn’t seen you for a while.’

Crowley spins on one heel, and then abruptly folds at the waist to perch on the arm of the sofa. ‘She… what? No!’

‘It’s a natural assumption, dear boy,’ Aziraphale says. ‘You do keep turning up here.’ He sighs. ‘Not that I miss the bad old days of prison sentences and hard labor, but does it strike you as a bit… unimaginative?’ Marriage this, marriage that. It’s been _years_ since anyone breezed passed their obvious parity in age and called Crowley his toyboy. If he was still on speaking terms with Upstairs, he’d consider requisitioning a younger corporeal form. He rather thinks he’d enjoy playing the twink. If they still have twinks, in this age of marriage and respectability.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Crowley says, jolting Aziraphale out of his train of thought. ‘I meant…’ he waves his hand, vaguely, and lowers his voice, ‘_sacramentally_.’

Aziraphale leans in, and lowers his voice too, even though, as far as the past quarter century or so has gone, he and Crowley could debate the 95 Theses at the doors of St Pauls and attract attention from no one but the Metropolitan Police.

‘What do you mean, _sacramentally_,’ he says. ‘When have we… I would definitely remember. There’d be priests and things.’

Crowley shakes his head, urgently. ‘No, that’s the thing, there _might not be_. Where _were_ you in the twelfth century, Angel?’

Crowley, of course, had been in Paris, at the University. Aziraphale had been at home, or, for a decade or so, in the Holy Land. Nasty business, that. Neither Upstairs’ work nor Below’s, but it had got so dire that Upstairs had ordered him out to encourage some sense of general holiness. Aziraphale had considered his options, and joined the court of Salah al-Din, where both the food and general morality were of higher standard.

‘The efficient cause of marriage,’ Crowley is saying, and Aziraphale bites down the urge to make a quip about the efficiency of marriage in general, ‘is the exchange of consent, in the present tense.’

‘I’m quite sure I never consented to marry you,’ Aziraphale says, still trying to keep up. ‘And,’ he adds, ‘demons don’t go around engaging in sacraments, that would be…’ well, sacrilegious.

‘_But_,’ Crowley goes on, ‘exchange of tokens, or verbal promises of fidelity and so on, in the future tense, followed by consummation, may constitute clandestine marriage. _Which_,’ he adds, ‘Is a sin but nevertheless a sacrament, and which I was specifically charged to encourage for the entirety of the fourteenth century!’ By his expression, this is on the list of Reasons Crowley Hated The Fourteenth Century. Aziraphale didn’t mind it, himself. There had been some awfully good poetry.

‘Oh,’ says Aziraphale, ‘that was your fault, was it? Tied up the courts something proper, for centuries.’

Crowley glows just a little with pride, before he remembers whatever damn fool anxiety he’s been hounded here by. ‘_You gave me a ring, Angel_.’

Aziraphale had given him a ring, somewhere in the fourteenth century. It had snakes on it: how could he not?

Crowley is practically vibrating off his perch on the sofa. Aziraphale stretches out one of his own legs, resting his foot gently against Crowley’s. Some of the tension leeches gently out of Crowley’s lanky frame.

‘My dear,’ Aziraphale says, ‘you’re letting the twenty-first century get to you.’

‘I like the twenty-first century,’ Crowley says, reflexively.

‘What I _mean_ is,’ Aziraphale ploughs ahead, ‘even putting aside our eschatological status, we can’t have been accidentally married. Any number of confused men and women, I’m sure you did a fine job there, but not _us_. Sodomy does not a sacrament of marriage make.’

‘_Angel_,’ Crowley says, and Aziraphale has the cold feeling that, if they were married, this would be the tone that signalled he had forgotten their anniversary. ‘We didn’t commit sodomy in the fourteenth century.’

‘Oh? No, I suppose we barely saw each other.’

‘And when we did,’ Crowley goes on, determined, ‘it was the fifteenth, and _I had a cunt then_.’

‘Oh, did you?’ This probably shouldn’t surprise Aziraphale. Crowley liked to keep his body fully incorporated (there they differed: Aziraphale had tried both of the usual genital arrangements, and a few of the less common, and all of them were a nuisance unless you had specific plans for them), and he _had_ spent a lot of the premodern period in skirts. That didn’t always mean a cunt, you never could tell with Crowley, but perhaps it had in the fifteenth century.

‘Exchange of tokens,’ Crowley enumerates, ‘Thirteen eighty-four. Promise of fidelity, thirteen ninety-five.’

‘What?’ Aziraphale started, and broke a little out of the hushed tones they’d been debating in. ‘I never.’ If he’d made such a promise, he’d have laid waste to it in the nineteenth century, and the patina of a broken promise in his aura would be with him still.

‘No,’ Crowley says, a little sadly, ‘I did, though.’

Aziraphale racks his brain. He is quite certain that if he can’t dredge up this memory, Crowley will be very put out, and might never fuck him again.

Then it comes to him: a conversation in the London stews. Crowley had lost a friend - a colleague, a woman (of this Crowley had been quite, vehemently insistent) who had worked alongside him for a while, dragged up before the magistrates on charges of sodomy.

Aziraphale never could stand to see Crowley grieve. He’d gathered him up from the inn where he’d been drowning his sorrows, and taken him home. Peeled the skirts off him, and found - unusually, yes, he remembered now how unusual that had been for Crowley at the time - Crowley incorporating a cock. Aziraphale hadn’t made the effort one way or another, himself, but he’d taken Crowley in his mouth. Afterwards, he’d asked Crowley why _this_ arrangement. Surely, if he was working in skirts, he’d be more effective with the other.

Crowley had shrugged, and said ‘they haven’t made a succubus of me yet, Angel’.

Aziraphale would have forgone all of the poetry - yes, all of it - in the fourteenth century, if it meant wiping that resigned look from Crowley’s face. He could hate the fourteenth century for that alone, for how closely Hell had dogged Crowley’s heels. And mankind’s, he supposed, but - well. Mankind had free will, and if the population of Europe had been courting Heaven and Hell at once in a communal, orgiastic frenzy, there was no reason that had to make just one demon so miserable.

Crowley had leaned his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder, and confessed, ‘I only… that one’s not for men, Angel. It’s for us.’

Perhaps, if he’d said _only for you_, Aziraphale might have realised what he meant at the time he said it. It would be several centuries before Aziraphale realised that when Crowley said _us_, he didn’t mean _all of us_, the category of celestial beings, he just meant: them. Aziraphale and Crowley. Their own side.

‘Promise of fidelity,’ Aziraphale says, and mentally readjusts his entire understanding of their relationship. ‘Thirteen ninety five. We didn’t… though.’

‘Followed,’ Crowley says, over top of him, ‘by coitus, fifteen twenty-five.’

That, Aziraphale remembers. They’d been in Würzburg, and there had been a manuscript. They’d been laughing over the idea of ‘The Age of Gabriel’; even then they’d been agreed that Gabriel was the most intolerable of all the angelic hierarchy (‘Angel, you know you outrank him? You’re a _principality_’. ‘Ugh, don’t remind them, I’ll have to attend meetings’). Somehow, that had been the funniest thing Crowley had ever heard, and then he’d crawled into Aziraphale’s lap. Under his habit he was so warm and wet and eager, it was practically no effort at all for Aziraphale to manifest something suitable. Crowley had pinned him to the narrow pallet, and fucked Aziraphale’s brains right out through his dick.

Crowley had gone on to meddle and ensure the manuscript didn’t see print until the seventeenth century, and if that served any demonic purpose other than to irritate Aziraphale, Aziraphale had never determined it.

‘Coitus,’ Aziraphale echoes, his wit no sharper now than it had been in fifteen twenty-five. ‘And we’re…’

‘Clandestinely married,’ Crowley says, in glum tones. His shoulders are still hunched, but he hasn’t moved his foot away from Aziraphale’s foot.

‘If you say so,’ Aziraphale says, still dubious. ‘Is that… a problem?’

‘If _I_ say so?’ Crowley splutters, and now he looks at Aziraphale properly, and makes one of those wild gesticulations that he is so prone to. ‘_I_ am not the sacramental authority around here!’

‘You seem to know more about this one than I do,’ Aziraphale says. He flexes his foot a little, tracing his toes over Crowley’s ankle bone. ‘I don’t think,’ he ventures, ‘I don’t think even the Papacy hold to that logic anymore.’

‘A _sacrament_, Angel.’ Crowley looks positively revolted.

Aziraphale considers him for a second. ‘My dear, I’d have thought you’d have positively relished the idea of a sacrament, if only to defile it.’

‘Not this one,’ Crowley says, leaden. ‘I _haven’t_. Not in all… It’s always been you.’

‘Nonsense,’ Aziraphale says, briskly, ‘Monogamy has nothing to do with it. We committed sodomy _twice_ last Sunday.’ Crowley goes to speak, but Aziraphale is nothing if not skilled in rhetoric, and he holds up a hand, ‘which, of course, does not _invalidate_ the sacrament; it’s rather like baptism, it can’t be reversed, but it _can_ be defiled, and I think all authorities would agree that vigorous sodomy on Sundays defiles the sacrament of marriage.’

Crowley does seem slightly heartened by this argument, and Aziraphale is warming to the task. He’s casting back, beyond the twenty-first century, for something particularly egregious to cite as evidence of their sacramental transgressions, when he remembers the nineteenth century.

‘Hold up a moment, dear boy,’ he says. Crowley nods, listening, and covers Aziraphale’s toes with the arch of his foot. ‘If, as you say, we had entered into a sacrament, it stands to reason that, whatever you might have done, my, ah, activities during the reign of Victoria would constitute defilement thereof.’

Crowley, who has asked quite a number of prurient questions about the eighteen-nineties, nods.

Aziraphale tweaks reality just a little. The result is his wings get bent up against the wing-back chair (terrible combination. Why would a winged being even buy a wing-backed chair?), but more importantly, his aura is clearly visible to the naked eye. Crowley could see it anyway, if he cared to look, but like Aziraphale, he rarely bothers anymore.

It is, as auras go, not the insufferable platinum of Gabriel or the avenging gold hue of Michael. It’s just… white. As white as it ever has been, unchanged by the end of the world. And, more saliently to this particular argument, unchanged by any of the fascinating fleshly endeavours he’d sampled in the age of steam.

‘No patina,’ Aziraphale says, just to be clear. He uses his normal speaking voice, too, not the clandestine theology voice. ‘Ergo, no sacrament.’ He considers this for a moment. ‘The rules are always worded for men and women,’ he says, ‘and, well, that’s hardly us, is it?’

‘No,’ Crowley admits, and finally raises his voice. ‘No, I suppose it isn’t.’ There’s a second’s pause and then Crowley adds, now gazing intently over Aziraphale's shoulder, 'So you didn't... with the ring. And everything. You weren't trying to... you weren't being cunning.'

'Sanctify you?' Aziraphale asks, gently. 'Never.'

Instead of going boneless on the sofa, as he often does when Aziraphale relieves him of some plaguing anxiety, Crowley is suddenly in Aziraphale’s lap, kissing him with immense enthusiasm.

‘Mmmnf!’ Aziraphale says. The weight, and the wiggling (Crowley is so very, very prone to wiggling) is normally a delight, but right now - ‘Wings!’ he says, and Crowley leans back, contrite.

‘Sorry, Angel. I just…’

Aziraphale uses the second afforded by the apology to tuck the wings away. ‘Relieved, are you?’

‘You have no idea,’ Crowley says. ‘If I had been wandering around with a _sacrament_ for centuries, I’d never feel clean again.’ He ducks in to kiss Aziraphale once more.

‘Yes well,’ Aziraphale says, when they manage to surface for air (breathing. Very human, very inconvenient at times), ‘I positively _relish_ the idea of being married to you, too, my dear.’

He regrets it, the moment the hurt flashes across Crowley’s face. Hurt, and - oh, that's fear. Crowley is afraid he's hurt _Aziraphale_. It occurs to Aizraphale, then, that there might be an entirely different interpretation to put on this whole situation, one that's less about sacraments and more about, well, them.

‘Crowley,’ he says, and he brings up one hand to Crowley’s face so Crowley can’t squirm away. ‘Did you… _want_ to be married?’ It could be achieved extra-sacramentally, so to speak. Wonders of the twenty-first century, and all that.

‘No,’ Crowley says, at once. ‘But.’

‘But what?’

Crowley endeavours to evade the question by kissing him, and it is very, very difficult not to let him.

‘Ifididhavetomarryi’dwantyou,’ Crowley admits, in a rush.

‘Duly noted,’ Aziraphale says. He kisses Crowley’s knuckles. It’s the hand with the ring, the ring he’d given him in the fourteenth century. ‘I think we’re… rather beyond all of that, sacraments and whatnot, don’t you?’

‘We’re on our own side,’ Crowley says, nuzzling a little into Aziraphale’s palm. ‘We make our own rules.’

‘Our own side,’ Aziraphale echoes. It has the weight of a promise, if not the existential clarity of a sacrament. Sacramentally speaking, marriage is a one-and-done affair; this, this is a promise that is always being remade. Aziraphale considers their position for a moment, and decides this certainly warrants an effort.

Crowley catches the frisson of it, and his eyes go wide as he palms Aziraphale’s crotch, as if it isn’t precisely the same cock Aziraphale has been manifesting since, oh, the tenth century or so.

‘My dear,’ Aziraphale says, ‘if you allow me a minute to lock up the shop, we can go upstairs.’ Crowley unfolds, and lets him out of the chair. ‘And,’ Aziraphale adds, ‘if you were to manifest yourself a cunt to match, I propose to bury my face in you and to regard it as an anointment.’

**Author's Note:**

> This was posted to Dreamwidth first- many thanks to readers there for picking up some SPaG and clarity issues!


End file.
